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Recipes: Dairy-free

It was raining on Saturday and I was restless, in need of something bright tasting, a fun experiment. I set my sights on air-fried sweet and sour pork. A while back, I’d made a version in the Instant Pot that was super easy. But I missing classic sweet and sour pork, which involves deep-frying the…

What does a family cook when they have access to all the artisanal fish sauce products that they could possibly ever need? The Pham family that owns Red Boat Fish Sauce often cooks up a fast, homey Viet favorite – pork belly in caramel sauce. Ann Pham has a recipe that her husband Cuong Pham…

Deliciously perplexing snacks abound in Asia, and oyster omelets are one of them. I had my first at a Taiwanese restaurant in California years ago and it was greasy and gooey, as it should be. Tt was interesting but not something I wanted to recreate. That was until I got Jia!, an earnest self-published book…

The first time I tasted commercially made bone broth, I was totally turned off. It was tart and not satisfying or soulful. Adding lemon juice to the cooking process draws out minerals and nutrients but lord, how can you keep drinking that stuff? I’d rather slurp a bowl of pho or sip on homemade stock….

I woke up the other morning wondering what would happen if I made a Vietnamese green hot chile sauce with tomatillos. I’ve recommended subbing green jalapenos for red chiles in the regular hot chile sauce (tuong ot) but didn’t think about the tomato that goes into the sauce. I just assumed that one would stick…

When it comes to Thanksgiving, my family celebrates in nontraditional ways – we make our favorite foods and my dad offers a blessing that usually includes a line like this: “We thank you Lord for the food on our table and thank you to the people who made the food.” He has many other eloquent…

You don’t have to take a fifteen-hour bus ride from Bangkok to mountainous Mae Hong Son City to taste kaeng hang lay tai curry (แกงฮังเลไต), one of northern Thailand’s most popular dishes. Just open Austin Bush’s new cookbook and head to the supermarket for the ingredients! Purity and detail fill his book. He wrote the…

Some of my better ideas come early in the morning, when I first wake up. This week, I had a hunch that I could make incredible gluten-free takoyaki dumpling balls. What are takoyaki? They’re a super popular Japanese street food dumpling (second to gyoza!) that are often filled with chunks of cooked octopus. Takoyaki are…

“Can we have grilled chicken skewers for dinner?” my husband asked. Sure. Wanting to try a new recipe, I looked in Bangkok, a splendid cookbook by Leela Punyaratabandhu. She had a interesting roast chicken recipe, and because I’d promised to deliver skewers, I simply deboned half a chicken, cut the flesh into strips, and applied half…

When uncommon flavor and cultural combinations present themselves, I can’t resist. That’s why I’ve made this intriguing date tamarind loaf cake recipe from Nik Sharma’s debut cookbook, Season, twice in the past couple of weeks. A Bombay native, Sharma came to America in in his early twenties about fifteen years ago and discovered a penchant…

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Hello, this site was created and maintained by me — Andrea Nguyen. Based in Northern California, I’m a James Beard Award-winning author, freelance writer, editor, cooking teacher, and consultant. Let’s dig in →